Augur

DEFINITION of 'Augur'

Founded in 2014, Augur is an open-sourced, decentralized, peer-to-peer prediction market platform. It provides around-the-clock, global, decentralized access to individual participants to predict the outcome of specific events and benefit from them.

BREAKING DOWN 'Augur'

Built on the Ethereumblockchain, Augur aims to create a highly precise prediction market that is based on the concept of “Wisdom of the Crowd” - the idea that the average prediction of enough people is far more accurate than that of select number of experts.

By eliminating the middlemen and operating on the decentralized blockchain, Augur allows individuals to create, predict, and speculate on the derivatives linked to the outcome of specific events at a substantially lower price compared to that of the present-day capital markets.

The predictions by participants are backed by their own money in the form of REPutation (REP) tokens. All such, predictions from diversified participants are available on the Ethereum blockchain as a large number of data points which allows for improved forecasting. Participants benefit by receiving incentives for their reporting and predicting activities.